SWF Seeks Same

With an immense effort of will, she calmed herself. The fluttering in her stomach slowed and almost ceased. She managed to stare at Allie questioningly. Who are you? She said, “Whoever you people are, I think you have the wrong apartment. You damn well better have a believable explanation.”

Allie parted her lips to say something, then she decided against it and remained silent. There she sat in the streaming lamplight, staring at Hedra accusingly and as if she couldn’t quite understand her. But it was Hedra who didn’t understand. What was Allie doing here? Why wasn’t she behind bars awaiting trial?

The big man absently holding the snubbed-out cigar uncrossed his weighty legs, then extended them and crossed them again at the ankles. I’m not going anywhere, his actions told her. He was wearing huge wing-tip shoes, scuffed as if he’d been kicking rocks. Sighing like an asthmatic, he reached into a suitcoat pocket and dragged out a small leather case and flipped it open. He made a show of extending it toward her. “I’m Detective Sergeant Will Kennedy,” he said, “N.Y.P.D. This is Miss Allison Jones. She used to live here, in this apartment.”

Hedra didn’t bother examining the identification, as if she were uninterested. She wished Allie would stop staring at her and say something. Wished the bitch would stop regarding her with that mixture of cold anger and puzzlement. And something else: pity. Hedra said, “I read in the papers Allison Jones was in jail.”

Sergeant Kennedy smiled with a strange sadness. “And so she was. Miss Jones here persisted in telling us an interesting story. One nobody believed.”

“Was it one she could prove?” Hedra asked.

Kennedy ignored the question. He sighed again. “She said a woman named Hedra Carlson had been her secret roommate and had … well, gradually taken over her life in a very real sense.”

“Taken over her life? What’s that mean?”

“Become her, you might say.”

The acrid smell of his dead cigar drifted to Hedra and nauseated her. “Well, I’m Hedra Carlson, but I just moved into this apartment a few weeks ago. I never saw it till the rental agent opened the door.”

“But you’re using the name Eilla Jones. We wouldn’t have noticed that on the computer printouts, except for the address. That made it kinda jump off the page at us. It was Miss Jones here who convinced us to get computer printouts on all rental units in Manhattan occupied since the date of her friend’s murder.” Kennedy shook his head in wonder. “All that kinda information’s available these days almost at the press of a button. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know anything about her friend’s murder, but I admit I used guile to get this apartment. Of that I plead guilty, Sergeant, but I’m not sorry. You have any idea how difficult it is to get an apartment in New York?”

“Everything’s difficult in New York,” he said, as if commiserating with her.

“I’d read about this woman in the papers”—a glance at Allie—“just after she killed that poor man in the hotel. One of the news items mentioned her address. The Upper West Side was exactly the area I wanted. I knew that, unless she was tried and acquitted in record time, her apartment would be available as soon as her rent wasn’t paid, so I kept an eye on the place and was first to apply. I was prepared to wait. Justice seldom moves swiftly, does it, Sergeant?”

“No, but it moves.”

For an instant he reminded Hedra of Justice itself, a force as inexorable as the swing of planets. She reassured herself he was nothing more than a very human, overweight cop. Nothing for her to fear if only she kept her head. Did he know how she’d convinced Myra Klinger to accept her for the apartment? Aging, ugly Myra, so grateful for someone like Hedra. “I did what was necessary in order to get the lease, Sergeant. I took advantage of Allison Jones’s predicament. That kind of thing’s done all the time to get an apartment in this city. One person’s misfortune is another’s good luck.” She stood very straight. “I’m not ashamed.”

He studied his snubbed-out cigar intently, as if at any second it might be the beneficiary of spontaneous combustion. “No, I expect you’re not.”

“I’ve never before laid eyes on Allison Jones.”

“Well, I can’t agree with that,” he said in a level, amiable tone, as if he were differing with her about the Mets’ chances to make the playoffs. “She’s here to positively identify you, which she’s done. And she says you and she lived here together for several months. That little by little you stole her life, her lover, her identity. That only two other people knew about you. One was murdered. The other died, maybe in an accident, though I suspect not. And you disappeared, leaving behind a mutilated corpse and a murder charge that appeared to belong to her.”

Hedra didn’t bother feigning surprise. “And now I’ve come back here?”

“You thought the real Allie Jones was in prison, possibly for life. No murder had been committed in the apartment. No one suspected a woman fitting your general description ever lived here. So it figured you’d return. There was no reason for you not to, this time. You’d almost have to, wouldn’t you, if you were Allie Jones?”

“This time’?”

“You’ve assumed other identities, other personalities, before Allie Jones.”

“But I told you, I only did what was needed to get the apartment. I never told anyone I was Allie Jones. I’m not Allie Jones.”

He rolled the cigar between his fingers. “Aren’t you?”

It was time for positions to be made clear. Hedra said, “This is all very serious. For you, if you can’t prove any of it. Which you can’t, because it isn’t true. If this woman says it is, I think you better have her sanity tested. Or maybe she’s sane as they come and she’s cooked up a story to give her the best possible deal in court. And anyone who can corroborate it, or prove to you it isn’t true, is conveniently dead. Doesn’t that make sense? If she’s under indictment for murder, what’s she got to lose?”

“The indictment’s been dropped,” Kennedy said. “Her story’s been corroborated.”

Hedra felt her heartbeat quicken, the blood pulse in her temples. She should have anticipated this. Don’t let them bluff you. “You said the only two people who could corroborate it were dead.”

“And they are.” Kennedy leisurely unwrapped the plain brown package he was holding. Peeled away the thick paper with maddening slowness, crinkling it noisily. He had fingers the size of sausages, with blunt, tobacco-